Cuts in Britain could cause a COVID-19 data drought

The British government on Friday shut down or scaled back a number of its COVID-19 surveillance programs, curtailing the collection of data that the United States and many other countries had come to rely on to understand the threat posed by emerging variants and the effectiveness of vaccines.

As more countries loosen their policies toward living with COVID-19 rather than snuffing it out, health experts worry that monitoring systems will become weaker, making it more difficult to predict new surges and to make sense of emerging variants.

Since the alpha variant emerged in fall 2020, Britain has served as a bellwether, tracking that variant as well as delta and omicron before they arrived in the U.S. After a slow start, U.S. genomic surveillance efforts have steadily improved with a modest increase in funding.

At the start of the pandemic, Britain was especially well prepared to set up a world-class virus tracking program. The country was already home to many experts on virus evolution and it could link that sequencing to electronic records from its National Health Service.

In March 2020, British researchers created a consortium to sequence as many viral genomes as they could lay hands on. Some samples came from tests that people took when they felt ill, others came from hospitals, and still others came from national surveys.

That last category was especially important, experts said. By testing hundreds of thousands of people at random each month, the researchers could detect new variants and outbreaks among people who did not even know they were sick.

By late 2020, Britain was performing genomic sequencing on thousands of virus samples a week from surveys and tests, supplying online databases with more than half of the world’s coronavirus genomes. That December, this data allowed researchers to identify alpha, the first coronavirus variant, in an outbreak in southeastern England.

Even in the past few weeks, Britain’s surveillance systems were giving the world crucial information about the BA.2 subvariant of omicron.

The cuts have come as Prime Minister Boris Johnson has called for Britain to “learn to live with this virus.” Although it would be scaling back surveillance, it said, “the government will continue to monitor cases, in hospital settings in particular, including using genomic sequencing, which will allow some insights into the evolution of the virus.”